‘Respectable Street’: XTC burst Britain’s stiff upper lip
Long been the Wiltshire town’s virtually exclusive rock ambassadors, whether they liked it or not, new wave’s XTC put Swindon on the musical map. Crafting a distinctly jerky post-punk before blooming into later psychedelic pop arrangements, songwriters and band founders Andy Patridge and Colin Moulding imbued their idiosyncratic songcraft with an unmistakable suburban sensibility, the everyday eccentricity that the pair no doubt soaked up growing up in the Penhill council estate.
XTC’s penchant for cynical lyrical examinations of society and its petty peculiarities were comically realised in 1980’s ‘Respectable Street’, allegedly based on Swindon’s Bowood Road diagonally opposite the flat above a shop on Kingshill Road Partridge lived on south of town. The fourth single from Black Sea, Partridge lifted the veil on the domestic disquiet and curtain-twitching miserablism that lurks behind the average English small-town’s terraced uniformity and neatly coifed bushes.
“(It was) actually inspired by my neighbour who spends half her life banging on the wall should I so much as sneeze,” Partridge revealed. “Not knocking people who have ‘respectable’ ideals (I know I must have a few), more of a song of people with double or hypocritical values. You know the sort, blind drunk one night, church the next. Or the mother who urges her daughter to ‘go out and have fun dear, isn’t abortion wonderful?’ If their daughter got pregnant they would beat her senseless.”
Despite the song’s irreverence, there’s an uncanny prescience to Black Sea‘s release a month before the disastrous Housing Act 1980. Pushed by Margaret Thatcher‘s ruling government, the Right to Buy scheme gave five million council house tenants in England and Wales the chance to buy their homes from their local authority, typically well below market value and with no prospect of replenishing the housing stock.
‘Respectable Street’s details of lurking resentments and orderly grievances would only get worse as the cross-sections of society that lived together became splintered, and class identity gave way to ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ competition.
While its acerbic social critique was given the OK by Virgin Records, it was seemingly the references to contraception and abortion that urged the label to re-record the offending lines.
“I thought half a spunky song with a half-gritty lyric is better than none so I agreed to rewrite the lyrics to get rid of certain words that Virgin found offensive,” Partridge revealed in 2014’s The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters. “So ‘contraception became ‘child prevention’, ‘abortion’ became ‘absorption’, which I thought was a lot filthier; seemed to suggest sanitary protection to me. ‘Retching’ became ‘stretching over the fence’ and fuck me, the radio still wouldn’t play it. I was told years later by a BBC employee they were really upset by the phrase ‘Sony Entertainment Centre’. The same reason Ray Davies had to change ‘Coca-Cola’ to ‘cherry cola’; it was an advertising brand. How frustrating is that!”
Flexing cuttingly mundane lyrical peeks at Little England’s busybody fustiness and swirling hypocrisies, as well as unwittingly dropped during a pivotal political sea-change taking place across the average small town street, XTC gave commuter-belt suburbia a soundtrack that’s less than flattering but all the more familiar for it.
